Mercy Is The House of God

Michael

My car broke down in Chicago, and I took a series of Greyhounds to North Dakota. One night I dreamed about this Mormon missionary I’d once given a blowjob once to. He was an acrobat with the roundest firmest ass I’d ever seen. In my dream he was on stilts and I was eating him out, but my mouth was dry, and this was frustrating cause I couldn’t get in deep enough and the more I tried, the drier my mouth was until I woke up in the middle of the night with a little light in my face and realized my mouth was dry because I’d been sleeping with it open.

The next time I dreamed I had two Siamese cats. They were flat and fat but this is because they had wheels instead of feet, and they rolled all over the house saying meow meow meow. Their tails were little antennas like the antennas of the motorized cars we had when we were kids, and one of the cats finally caught a mouse, but it was a computer mouse on a pad, and it kept waving its tail and asking for cheese. I told it to go fuck itself and plugged it into my computer, and this is when I woke up with a hard one and a need to piss and waited for the hard on to go away because that makes pissing impossible even when you’re not traveling seventy five miles an hour on a moving bus.

I do not want to talk about the Mormon missionary. It was not like a porn. It was like I saw two boys telling me they knew how the world worked and they could save me and something in me wanted to tell them they were full of shit. So I did what I did. The night before I called the monastery I met someone on Craigslist. I thought, this is the way to feel something, and I won’t have to travel. I think his name was John and he was nineteen. I couldn’t trust myself to get it up for him, so I had him fuck me in the ass. After he’d left I felt raw and strange and hollow and knew I needed to get the fuck out of town.

Jay, you said find something to love. Find a way to love the world. I love this big sky that is a blue that only happens in winter, when ice and snow scrub the sky clean and it shines and the sun falls hard on the glittering snow. I love the plains stretching out to the mountains in the distance, black and streaked with white. I have never seen mountains, and I don’t think I’ve ever been in love with the world.

But it’s too much world, and I turn my eyes from the window to the little rooms and the chapel of the monastery. The songs the brothers sing I understand only a little better than the Bible I half read. In the chapel I sit and watch them pray and scribble down the words they write.

O Oriens,
splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae:
veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

I imagine myself like one of the monks from the Middle Ages, and think of going into the scriptorium to copy out this cryptic message, but there is not scriptorium and this is not a medieval monastery, so I take out my phone, type it in and wait for a translation.

O Morning Star,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

The translation doesn’t make it any more sensible, but possibly more beautiful. I do not understand any of this, but it’s beautiful and I need beauty.

It’s almost Christmas.

I’ve started talking to Brother Raymond. I tell him the truth. It’s not that I hate God or something. He’s never been a part of my life, and the truth is, he’s a tall order. I don’t know that I I need religion, which sounds a bit much, I admit, because I’m here. And I don’t know if I believe in God.

“Some people don’t need to,” Brother Raymond says, and I must be blinking at him.

“It isn’t a matter of belief, but of being. When I was younger than you, I was at a mass back in Cleveland, and I saw the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. The incense, how it filled the church so much that you could barely see the gold of the paten glinting through the smoke. The singing, ‘Pange Lingua Gloriosi!’ The way it once was, in the old days. It was beautiful. And though it was beautiful there was something else.”

So I guessed “comfort.” Because that’s always what little atheists and agnostics say to make religious people feel small, “Religion gives you comfort.”

“No,” Brother Raymond said. “This was something more like terror. Like the cracking of a great and terrible door. Something like… vision.”

He didn’t speak for a moment, and I saw how old he was, skin like paper, beautiful, translucent, folded and then folded again like infinite origami. He was what they call luminous.

“The words,” he said. “The words always point to other words and those words are always pointing to something. The mistake that atheists make is they can’t tell the words from what is past the words. They don’t want to. Because in the end it is as terrible as it is comfortable. More maybe. That’s the same mistake the believers make too. I saw…. A crack. A glimpse of the something. And I have followed it all of my life. It’s why I’m here. Why I have remained.”

“Do you ever see it?” I asked. “Did you see it? Again?”

His face lit up until I could see it, and he told me, “Oh, Michael. It’s in you. You are so bright. Your love and your longing and your suffering. Your bitter passion. It is burning right through you. You are a temple of the Holy Spirit and God burns so bright in you I don’t know how you cannot know it. Such a one as you has loved but may have forgotten. Someone like you, must have been truly loved.”

Two days later I am driving away into the snow. Here you can drive and drive and not stop unless you run out of gas. The sky is over me and I can hear Brother Raymond’s words.

“There is a little house we have where men go to look for God, and if you would like to look why don’t you take some time there.”

But even that house is not far enough, and today I must drive and drive until I find some kind of answer. There are small houses, great farms, stretches of nothing. White snow one snow under a the great sky. I push the gas to accelerate and thing I’ll drive till I die.